Led by: Professor Mike Graham, Imperial College London, and Professor Yonghua Song, Zhejiang University EPSRC funding: £797,054
The FENGBO-WIND project aims to utilise the newest developments in high-performance computing, physics-based modelling and data science, to create a new generation of predicting capabilities that support the design and operation of more economical offshore wind farms, while assessing and seeking to minimise their environmental impact.
Mike Graham is Professor of Unsteady Aerodynamics in the Aeronautics Department of Imperial College. He is currently the PI for the Imperial College–Warwick University project FENGBO-Wind which is part of the UK-China Offshore Rewable Energy Consortium programme.
Mike Graham has been on the staff at Imperial College since 1970, joining as a lecturer after taking a Maths BA degree (1963) at Cambridge University and a PhD in Aeronautics (1967) at Imperial College, becoming Head of the Department of Aeronautics from 1999 - 2003. During his career at the College he has worked in the research fields of Low-Speed Aerodynamics (turbulence, wakes, wind engineering), Marine Technology (wave and current forces on fixed structures and floating bodies) and since 1990 Renewable Energy (wind turbine aerodynamics and tidal turbine hydrodynamics).
This research has been both experimental and theoretical/computational and has been published in more than 150 research papers in peer-reviewed journals and conference proceedings. He has participated in many EPSRC, EU and other funded projects including leading a number of consortium projects, relevant examples being EPSRC Marine CFD, EU MARNET(technical area coordinator) and EU(Joule): ROTOW(rotor-tower interaction) and has been a member of UK Govt. DTI committees on renewable energy and accelerated hydrocarbon recovery, the EPSRC Oil and Gas Extraction Programme and the High Performance Computing Panel CCP12. He is a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, the Royal Aeronautical Society and the Royal Institution of Naval Architects.
Rafael Palacios is Reader in Aeronautics at Imperial College London, where he has been since 2007. He is Aeronautical Engineer from Universidad Politécnica, Madrid, and Ph.D. in Aerospace Engineering from the University of Michigan, which he attended with a Fulbright fellowship. Before his PhD he spent four years at Airbus’s Aeroelasticity Department near Madrid. His research is on computational methods in aeroservoelasticity and fluid-structure interactions, with applications to aeroelastic design and control of large offshore wind turbines and very flexible air vehicles. His research has been funded by the UK Research Council, European Commission, AFOSR, QinetiQ and Airbus.
He has also acted as technical consultant with Airbus, Facebook and MSC Software in the translation of his research in nonlinear aeroelasticity to industrial applications. At Imperial he is theme leader for Offshore Renewable Energy research at the Energy Futures Lab. He received the best undergraduate student award in Spain, the AIAA Foundation Orville and Wilbur Wright Graduate Award for best PhD thesis in aerospace engineering in the US, and Imperial’s best supervisor award in 2013. Rafael is associate editor of Progress in Aerospace Sciences, the Journal of Fluids and Structures, and the Journal of Aircraft, a member of the AIAA Structural Dynamics Technical Committee, and a Fellow of the Royal Aeronautical Society. For more information as well as a full list of publications, please visit Rafael’s personal web site at Imperial College London or the website of the Load Control and Aeroelastics Research Lab.
Prof. Matthew Piggott is Professor of Computational Geoscience and Engineering at Imperial College London. He is a member of the Department of Earth Science and Engineering where he Heads the Computational Geoscience and Engineering Research Section. He obtained Masters and PhD degrees in Mathematics from the University of Bath, specialising in Numerical Analysis and joined Imperial College London in 2001. He is Deputy Director for the NERC Doctoral Training Partnership “Science and Solutions for a Changing Planet”. His research interests include the development of advanced open source numerical methods for environmental flows utilising adaptive mesh methods and massively parallel algorithms, along with inversion, optimisation and uncertainty quantification techniques, and their application across a range of environmental and energy motivated problems.
He has authored 100+ peer reviewed publications in these areas, raised over £10M of UK Research Council and industrial funding, and supervised 35 PhD students and 20 postdoctoral researchers. Current NERC funding includes a Consortium project NE/K000047/1: “Will climate change in the Arctic increase the landslide-tsunami risk to the UK?” where Prof. Piggott leads a work package on hydrodynamic modelling and quantitative hazard assessment, and NE/S006427/1 on the simulation of the ocean dynamics under ice shelves. Numerical technology development is funded by a series of EPSRC projects, including the Platform EP/L000407/1: “Underpinning technologies for finite element simulation”, recently renewed under EP/R029423/1 “PRISM: Platform for Research In Simulation Methods”, and a Software for the Future project EP/M011054/1: “A new simulation and optimisation platform for marine technology”. He works on or coordinates the development of several computational codes of relevance to this project, including: Fluidity [CFD and marine modelling with finite elements and adaptive unstructured meshes - http://fluidity-project.org]; OpenTidalFarm [simulation and adjoint-based optimisation of tidal turbine arrays - http://opentidalfarm.org]; and Thetis [3D coastal ocean model built using the Firedrake framework - http://thetisproject.org].
Professor Xiaowei Zhao is Professor of Control Engineering at the University of Warwick. He is an EPSRC Fellow and a co-director of the EPSRC Supergen ORE (Offshore Renewable Energy) Hub. He obtained his PhD in Control Theory from Imperial College London in 2010 and then worked as a postdoctoral researcher in the Control Engineering Group of the University of Oxford until 2013. After that he joined the University of Warwick where he was awarded a chair in 2018. At Warwick he has established the Intelligent Control & Smart Energy (ICSE) research group which currently includes around 20 PhD students and postdoctoral researchers. His main research areas are control theory and machine learning with applications to the modelling and control of offshore renewable energy systems and their grid integration, local smart energy systems, and autonomous systems. He currently has six main research projects (four from EPSRC and two from H2020) in these areas with a total project values of £20 million.
Georgios (Yorgos) Deskos was a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Aeronautics at Imperial College London where he worked on the modelling, design and optimisation of offshore wind farms as part of the EPSRC funded project: FENGBO-WIND (Farming the Environment into the Grid: Big data in Offshore Wind). He recently completed his PhD work on “Numerical simulations of wind turbine wakes” for which he won third place in the prestigious ERCOFTAC Osborne Reynolds Day 2018 competition. He works now for NREL in Colorado
Prof. Song is a world-renowned scholar in electrical engineering. He received his Ph.D. from the China Electric Power Research Institute. Due to his outstanding knowledge in his field and contributions to power system research, he was awarded D.Sc. by Brunel University in 2002 and an Honorary D.Eng. by Bath University in 2014.
He has been rector of the University of Macau since January 2018.
From 1997 to 2010, he was a Professor of Department of Electronic and Computer Engineering, Brunel University, UK. He held the Royal Academy of Engineering/Nuclear Electric/Siemens Chair of Power Systems at Brunel from Jan 1997 to Dec 2001. In 2004, he was appointed the pro-vice-chancellor for graduate studies at Brunel.
In 2009, he was an assistant president and professor of electrical engineering at Tsinghua University. He was also appointed as the Director of Chinese National Recruitment Program of Global Experts (1000 Talents Program) Office until December 2012. In November 2012, he joined Zhejiang University as executive vice president and the founding dean of the International Campus.
From 1991 to 1992, Song was the Royal Society Visiting Fellow at the School of Mathematics, University of Bristol, UK and from 1992 to 1993, he was the research officer at School of Electronic and Electrical Engineering and lecturer from 1993 to 1994 at the University of Bath, UK.
